Fake AI Melodramas Flood X, Rewarding Creators With Revenue Sharing Payouts

Heartwarming courtroom drama where a wronged protagonist gets vindicated by their child's timely revelation. Divorce disputes resolved by hidden documents. Airline seat disputes won with righteous fury. These tales proliferate across X in neat narrative packages, each designed to trigger outrage followed by satisfaction—and crucially, clicks.

Behind many of these stories isn't lived experience but artificial intelligence. A creator claiming to be a 21-year-old trader based in Nigeria disclosed that he uses Grok or ChatGPT to compose the posts, then publishes them to X where they routinely rack up hundreds of thousands or millions of views. These melodramas feed into X's Creative Revenue Sharing program, which distributes payments to accounts that generate engagement, provided they meet minimum thresholds: Premium membership, 500 verified followers, and 5 million impressions over three months.

How the Revenue Model Works#

The program was ostensibly designed to nurture "authentic, high-quality content." Yet its reliance on engagement metrics—rather than editorial judgment—has made it vulnerable to manipulation. Participants report earning $500 to $700 per payment cycle, with some claiming thousands. X processes payouts every two weeks, creating steady incentive for volume production.

A Formulaic Structure Perfected for Virality#

Academic researchers have identified a nearly mechanical format behind these posts. An innocent protagonist faces injustice—wrongful termination, eviction, fraud, or legal overreach. Then comes the reversal: vindication arrives, often spectacularly, while the antagonist is humiliated or exposed. The payoff releases dopamine, rewarding the reader for reading to the end.

Rob Cover, a digital ethnography researcher at Australia's RMIT, notes that the structure is "as formalized as a sonnet," reliably triggering appetite for fairness and retribution. Jenna Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland studying AI writing, observed that creators have "simply optimized for the least effort and the most engagement, which means using easy, well-known tropes and prompting AI to write something that fits the bill."

X's Mixed Response to Platform Abuse#

X has taken enforcement action against blatant fraud within its revenue programs. In May 2025, the company sued eight Vietnamese creators and 25 unnamed defendants, alleging they defrauded the revenue-sharing initiative through bot-driven engagement and fake content. The platform has also cracked down on "aggregators" republishing news and creators abusing the BREAKING tag. In July, X removed millions of posts that violated its copyright policies.